Truly Tupelo

Ice skating
• The introduction of hockey to Tupelo brought about another activity not usually associated with the South: ice skating.
Public skating began in 1998 when the Tupelo Coliseum, now the BancorpArena, built an ice rink to accommodate a newly organized professional hockey team, the Tupelo T-Rex.
For $7, people could whiz around the ice after the hockey games or on days no other events were scheduled.
“The response when it first started was slow, but it’s really taken off since December and exceeded our expectations” said then-coliseum spokesman Joel Roach during the venue’s first season.
But when the T-Rex folded in 2001, public skating took a hiatus, said arena Director Todd Hunt.
Arena staff revived the tradition in 2007, and it has continued every year since then – still at $7 per person.Truly Tupelo appears every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in 2010 as part of the 140th anniversary of both the city and the Daily Journal.